Saturday, June 28, 2014

Arne Duncan was in Tennessee last month to deliver the keynote at a corporate Education Writers Association. Duncan loves Tennessee, as it represents one of the few states that has remained loyal to the RTTT plan devised by the Gates Foundation.Since 2009 Duncan has been spewing the bromide that education is the civil rights issue of our time, but in Nashville in May, Duncan took his game up a notch. Now he's claiming that equality means equalizing test score results. Once that is done, by whatever means necessary (see documented brutality of KIPP and KIPP knock-offs), the equality will have been achieved without ever spending a nickel or minute on the structural issues that our nation continues to ignore in the same way we ignore our rotting bridges, highways, water systems, etc.

Citing the 60th anniversary of Brown
vs Board of education decision, which once held schools accountable for racial
integration, Duncan said this generation must hold schools accountable for
academic outcomes that are still unequal.

“Without accountability there is no
imperative to face the hard truths of our education system,” Duncan said.

Like the old civil rights battles,
Duncan said the modern ones require winning local support. He described four
teachers he met recently at a Tennessee school who spent their evening at a
student’s softball game, earning the trust of that student’s mother.

“Tennessee’s example in the history of Brown actually
gives me great optimism,” Duncan said. “To paraphrase Dr. King, the moral
arc of our schools is long but it bends toward justice, and justice means true
equity and opportunity for all.”

Really, Arne? To paraphrase Dr.
King? Are teachers going to a ballgame the clear signs you have been
looking for that Tennessee schools are bending toward justice? Or is it
the NAEP scores in 2013 that you are still hyping, even though the scores in
2011 in TN went down almost as much as 2013 went up-- so that TN is just above
where it was in 2009 in terms of NAEP?

What would Dr. King say about
the apartheid charter schools that federal policy incentivizes or outright
dictates? One of the keys to the RTTT kingdom was to remove charter
school caps, which Tennessee has done will all the haste required to land their
$501 million prize in 2010.

Now Memphis has over 40 of these
segregated hellholes staffed by clueless beginners from TFA or one of TFA's knock-offs,
and Nashville has 18.

Here is what Tennessee's real
record is in terms of civil rights in schools. From TMoE: